The Nimbusoft Aurora is the Ultrabook entry in a range of products the startup company is offering for sale, designed to offer portability at a reasonable price. Based on a chassis from original design manufacturer (ODM) Topstar, the Aurora can be tweaked at the time of ordering: the review sample sent across came with an SSD instead of a hard drive and an upgraded wireless card, both of which were reflected in the slightly raised price in the review.

The hardware’s not the star here, though: Nimbusoft is one of the only companies in the UK not only offering Linux as a pre-installed option on its devices but offering Linux exclusively. You’ll find no option to buy Windows on the Nimbusoft website, nor a PC Specialist-style option to buy the devices without an operating system installed; instead, all laptops come equipped with Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS and you choice of officially-supported desktop environments.

As a Linux user myself, it’s a great feeling knowing that the laptop you’re firing up is fully supported and won’t run into any strange errors as a result of not-quite-ready wireless drivers or a badly-supported LCD backlight circuit. Accordingly, I was thrilled when the Aurora booted up in to an absolutely stock Ubuntu install with no bloat or branding, ready for me to give the device a name and create my user account.

While Nimbusoft may not offer Windows machines, the same can’t be said for other Topstar customers; as a result, there’s the usual workaround for the Super key being emblazoned with Microsoft’s Windows logo: a sticker, with a range of replacement logos available at the time of purchase or the key being left stock if you’d prefer. The same can’t be said of the Internet Explorer logo on one of the shortcut keys, though, and I was disappointed that this didn’t trigger Firefox when pressed – but that, the relatively poor keyboard, and a slightly sub-par battery life of five hours, were pretty much the only negative points I encountered during the review.

If you’d like to read my full analysis from a Linux user’s perspective, Issue 173 is on shelves now and also available electronically from Zinio and similar distribution services.

It’s always nice to see your name in a new publication, and doubly so when it’s the magazine’s very first issue, so imagine my pleasure when Future Publishing’s Create Magazine hit shelves this week and brought my feature on building your own Linux PC along for the ride.

Presently exclusive to North America, Create – styled [email protected] – is billed as offering “adventures in technology” to a mixed audience ranging from those with considerable technical proficiency to relative newcomers. This broad focus can be seen in the content on offer from the launch issue: my relatively technical guide to building a desktop PC from parts sits alongside tutorials on installing Minecraft on an old Apple MacBook and booting up a Raspberry Pi for the first time, along with building your own drone and seeing how camera lenses are made.

The PC-building feature itself was originally written for Imagine Publishing’s Linux User & Developer Magazine and first appeared in Issue 161, alongside my detailed reviews of a number of Steam Machine PCs and my four-page news spread. Written in partnership with Overclockers UK, which kindly provided the parts required for the build, the guide walks the reader through choosing components with an eye on price, performance, and compatibility with the Linux kernel – the latter being a key point that can be overlooked by system builders more used to building Windows-based machines – before putting everything together in an attractive case and installing the operating system.

Those who missed the feature the first time around and are located in North America will find Create Issue 1 on shop shelves now, while international readers can purchase a copy from Future’s web store.

Readers of this latest issue of Imagine Publishing’s Linux User & Developer will find my review of the surprisingly capable Nextcloud Box, a bare-bones network attached storage (NAS) system based around a Raspberry Pi 2.

Provided as a press sample by Nextcloud, the company split from the Owncloud project, the Nextcloud Box is at its heart a rebadged – though, oddly, cheaper – Western Digital Labs PiDrive. Inside the box you find the black plastic housing, a 1TB USB hard drive, a clever splitter cable for power and data, and the screws you need to mount your own Raspberry Pi. You also get a small 4GB micro-SD card, which serves as the bootstrap device: on first run, the operating system is copied from this micro-SD to the 1TB hard drive.

It’s the contents of the micro-SD card that makes the Nextcloud Box distinct from the PiDrive: it contains a copy of Ubuntu Snappy Core and a preinstalled Snap of the Nextcloud NAS software. Administered almost entirely from a web interface, Nextcloud proved to a powerful NAS package with everything from encrypted storage and remote access to centralised calendar and contact facilities – and with additional functionality available through a built-in ‘app store’ feature.

If you’re interested to read the full review Linux User & Developer Issue 172 is on shelves now at supermarkets and newsagents throughout the land, or can be grabbed in digital format from Zinio and similar services.

In this latest issue of Imagine Publishing’s popular Linux User & Developer you’ll find my two-page review of NextThingCo’s clever CHIP single-board computer and PocketCHIP hand-held computer, combined into a single piece thanks to their similarity.

The CHIP was launched to crowdfunding enthusiasts as the world’s first $9 single-board computer capable of running a fully-functional GNU/Linux desktop user interface, long before the Raspberry Pi Zero hit the market. It was met with considerable scepticism, but launch it did – and, earlier this year, became available to buy outside crowdfunding for the first time.

NextThingCo also launched the PocketCHIP, a demonstration of just what you can do with the matchbox-sized CHIP. An entirely open hardware design – meaning you can take the PocketCHIP and tweak it to your needs before building your own – the PocketCHIP acts as a carrier to a CHIP board running a custom operating system and adds a built-in touch screen, keyboard based on cheap but awkward bubble technology, and an audio output.

The software is limited, to be sure – there are only six overall applications available, and while you can install your own you won’t find them appearing in the PocketCHIP’s menu system nor are they likely to play well with the extremely low resolution screen – but I can’t deny having had a seriously fun time playing with the device and its 90s aesthetic.

For the full review, including benchmarks against the rival Raspberry Pi Zero, you’ll want to head to your local newsagent, supermarket, or pick up an electronic copy via Zinio or a similar distribution service.

This month’s Linux User & Developer includes my review of Pimoroni’s Black Hat Hack3r family of break-out boards, designed for both the mainstream Raspberry Pi and ultra-compact Raspberry Pi Zero single-board computers (SBCs).

While Pimoroni isn’t exclusively focused on the Raspberry Pi platform, it’s no secret that the Sheffield-based company has plenty of ideas in mind for enhancing the popular devices. The Black Hat Hack3r range started out as an internal development tool, designed to make it easier to debug Hardware Attached on Top (HAT) devices – add-on boards which cover the 40-pin general-purpose input-output (GPIO) header on top of the Raspberry Pi – without having to deal with a rat’s nest of cables or easily-knocked debug clips.

The boards are simple at their heart: with no active components, all they do is mirror the GPIO header. A ribbon cable connects the board – available in full-size and a Mini variant designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi Zero – to the Pi’s GPIO header, and the HAT under investigation is connected to the mirrored header. A third header then provides full access to all 40 pins, which opens up a wealth of possibilities: you can add additional hardware at the same time as the HAT, sniff signals coming to or from the HAT for debugging or reverse engineering reasons, or even connect more than one HAT to a single Pi by daisy-chaining multiple boards.

I’ve long been a fan of Pimoroni’s designs, and the Black Hat Hack3rs are no exception to the company’s rule of clever boards with attractive layouts and finishes. To get my full opinion, though, you’ll have to pick up a copy of Linux User & Developer Issue 167 from your nearest newsagent, supermarket, or electronically via digital distribution services such as Zinio.

This month’s Linux User & Developer includes a review of the Cubietruck Plus – also known as the Cubieboard 5 – I previously reviewed in Custom PC Issue 154.

CubieTech’s latest design, the Cubietruck Plus borrows the overall design from its predecessor but swaps out the weedy dual-core Allwinner A20 processor for an altogether beefier H8 octa-core chip. Kindly supplied for review by low-power computing specialist New IT, I was eager to put the board through its paces – especially as previous octa-core single-board computer (SBC) designs have suffered from some reliability issues when fully loaded for extended periods.

Sadly, as with my earlier review, there’s one piece of information which didn’t come to light prior to the deadline: devices, including single-board computers, based on Allwinner chips and using the company’s modified Linux kernel source have been found to suffer from a back-door which allows any process running on the system to silently and immediately gain root-level (superuser) privileges. While it doesn’t allow for remote execution, it can make existing bugs more readily exploitable – and if you’re using the Cubietruck Plus or any other Allwinner-based device, it’s worth checking to see if you’re affected.

This aside, the Cubietruck Plus certainly impressed during both reviews – though if you want to find out if I think it justifies its considerable price premium over the four-core Raspberry Pi 3, you’ll have to pick up a copy of the magazine from your local newsagent, supermarket, or digitally via Zinio or similar services.

For my regular review in Linux User & Developer this month I had the great pleasure to spend time with the BBC’s first serious hardware project since it teamed up with Acorn in the 80s: the BBC micro:bit.

Originally known as the Micro Bit, the micro:bit is a teeny-tiny microcontroller-based educational programming platform based on the CodeBug. Like the CodeBug, the micro:bit uses a 5×5 LED matrix on its front side as its main method of communicating with the outside world; unlike the CodeBug, the micro:bit includes built-in Bluetooth Low Energy support as well as a gyroscope and magnetic compass, along with the two-button input layout the two share.

With the backing of the BBC, and a major funding drive from Barclay’s which has seen a micro:bit promised to ever Year Seven pupil the UK entirely free of charge, it’s no surprise to see that plenty of companies are involved in the project. At launch, the device boasted no fewer than four programming languages – three provided by Microsoft – in its web-based IDE, along with a neat smartphone app built by Samsung allowing for Bluetooth LE-based interaction and even wireless flashing of programs.

Based on the ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller (and, oddly, a significantly more powerful Cortex-M0+ which is used exclusively to handle the USB Mass Storage implementation, allowing for mbed-style drag-and-drop flashing without the need to install drivers or a toolchain locally) the micro:bit is impressive, as is the wealth of documentation and supporting materials the BBC has compiled. There’s a catch, mind you: so far, the BBC has not announced commercial availability – meaning we have no idea how much the gadget is going to cost people not included in the generous Barclay’s-funded giveaway programme.

For the full low-down, plus a lot more interesting stuff written by people who aren’t me, head to your local magazine outlet or stay where you are and pick up a digital copy via Zinio or similar services.

My review for this month’s Linux User & Developer magazine is of a device I’ve been playing with for a while now: the Raspberry Pi 3, the first single-board computer from the Raspberry Pi Foundation to include a 64-bit CPU and integrated radio chip.

Following my cover feature for The MagPi magazine, the Raspberry Pi 3 once again graces a magazine cover – and well it should. The switch from ARM Cortex-A7 to ARM Cortex-A53 processors cores in the new Broadcom BCM2837 system-on-chip (SoC) brings with it a considerable performance boost over the Raspberry Pi 2, which itself left the original single-core Raspberry Pi in the dust.

That’s even before discussing the integrated wireless connectivity. Boasting 2.4GHz Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.1, and Bluetooth Low Energy, the Raspberry Pi 3 certainly ticks a lot of boxes on the connectivity front – even if the integrated Ethernet port still communicates with the SoC through a shared single USB channel. Best of all, the board is entirely compatible with accessories and software written for earlier models – going all the way back to the early raft of add-ons for the original Raspberry Pi.

One discovery that cropped up between the MagPi launch feature and this review, though, was heat generation: testing under my thermal camera, published on imgur for the curious, revealed that the Raspberry Pi 3 gets considerably hotter than its predecessors – over 100°C under CPU load. This leads to a couple of issues: potential burns if you poke the chip and thermal throttling which dramatically harms performance if the Pi 3 is installed in a case. Coupled with even harsher throttling – from 1.2GHz to just 600MHz – when used with marginal power supplies or low-quality micro-USB cables, there are caveats aplenty.

For the full low-down, pick up a copy of Linux User & Developer Issue 164 from your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or electronically via services such as Zinio.

This month’s Linux User & Developer includes my review of the Arduino-produced and Intel-chip-toting Genuino 101 microcontroller and the final five-page news spread, with publisher Imagine shuffling things around and taking the news coverage in-house after lo these many years.

Kindly supplied as a press sample by Intel, the Genuino 101 is special for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s one of the first commercially-available devices to be sold under the new Genuino brand outside the US – a necessity thanks to some hairy legal wrangling between two competing companies who have a claim to the Arduino trademark. Secondly, it’s the first outing for Intel’s new Curie module, a wearable-centric system-on-chip that combines microcomputer and microcontroller functionality.

Where Intel’s previous efforts at developing boards for the maker market have been somewhat hard to love, it’s definitely doing something right with the Genuino 101. The board is based on the popular Arduino Uno layout, includes 5V-safe pins despite running 3.3V logic, and can run most Arduino sketches unmodified. Better still, the Curie module includes integrated Bluetooth Low Energy support and an accelerometer sensor.

The design of the chip, though, is odd, and it’s something on which I focus during the review: the Curie uses two processors, an x86 Quark based on the old Pentium microarchitecture to run an underlying real-time operating system (RTOS) and an Argonaut RISC Core (ARC) which takes care of being a microcontroller and actually running the Arduino sketch. At the time of writing, the divide was stark: the Quark is entirely locked off from user access, taking over automatically for tasks like Bluetooth communication when requested by the ARC. While Intel has promised to release the source for the RTOS, allowing users to run their own code on the Quark as well as the ARC, this has yet to materialise.

Despite this, I was impressed with the Genuino 101 – but to read my full conclusion, you’ll have to hie thee hence to a supermarket, newsagent, or snag an electronic copy via Zinio or similar digital distribution services.

In addition to my regular four-page news spread, this month’s Linux User & Developer features a review of a maker-oriented computer-on-module (COM): the LeMaker Guitar.

The Guitar comes from the same company that brought us the Banana Pro, but while LeMaker has ditched its fruit-themed product nomenclature it’s still drawing inspiration from the same source: the Guitar the Chinese company’s equivalent to the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, based on the same SODIMM-layout module design and featuring a bundled break-out board to make the device’s features more accessible to hobbyists.

Where it improves on the Compute Module’s design is in its specifications: an Action system-on-chip (SoC) processor proves considerably more capable than the ageing BCM2835 of the Raspberry Pi Compute Module, there’s more RAM, and it even has Wi-Fi connectivity – though this, sadly, is based on a module attached to the break-out board, meaning that it’s not something you’ll have available should you decide to build your own circuit with the Guitar module at its heart.

When I reviewed the device, I was particularly impressed with the performance for the price – especially given that the Compute Module is considerably more expensive than the Guitar. In the time since the review, though, retailers have significantly discounted the Compute Module ahead of the planned launch of a 64-bit, 1.2GHz Compute Module 3 later this year based on the same BCM2837 SoC as the newly-launched Raspberry Pi 3. If you’re not in a rush, in other words, it may be worth seeing how much the Compute Module 3 costs before designing anything around the Guitar.

The full review, along with my four-page news spread, can be found gracing the shelves of your nearest supermarket, newsagent, or as a series of zeroes and ones on digital distribution services including Zinio.

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